As Yost, others press for action, House looking to pass e-school changes

Jim Siegel The Columbus Dispatch @phrontpage

Tuesday

Jun 19, 2018 at 1:27 PMJun 19, 2018 at 1:56 PM

ECOT has been auctioned off in pieces, but the enrollment count issue that led to its downfall and is impacting other Ohio online schools so far remains unaddressed as state lawmakers prepare to head into a summer break.

State Auditor Dave Yost, along with both liberal- and conservative-leaning education policy advocates, say lawmakers need to act with more haste in clarifying how to count the thousands of students attending Ohio e-schools.

“The biggest open question related to online education is what is the best way to fund this and make sure taxpayers are getting what they think they are,” said Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio Policy and advocacy for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a charter sponsor that is calling for a committee to study performance-based funding.

It appears lawmakers are now ready to take some action.

House Republicans introduced a bill Tuesday, and it was quickly set for an afternoon hearing, that would create a study committee to determine how to better fund online schools. The committee would be required to produce recommendations in November, in time for the post-election lame duck legislative session.

“This will allow us some time, a little bit of runway, to be thoughtful about the changes we need to make on the funding side, and puts in place some changes to be sure we don’t have another situation like ECOT,” said House Speaker Ryan Smith, R-Bidwell.

“We just need better results out of our virtual schools. We need to be able to make sure that the children coming out of there are getting a quality education and hold them to a high standard. We don’t have results like we did at ECOT in any public school, and if we did, we would take drastic action.”

The bill, which reportedly includes a number of suggestions made by Yost, could pass the House before they leave for summer break at the end of next week, depending on how discussions go, Smith said. Details of the bill will be available later on Tuesday, though it does include a Yost proposal to have legislative review of the Department of Education's enrollment review manual, and additional financial disclosure of for-profit charter management companies.

Lawmakers need to put down the ECOT political hot potato and engage in some serious conversation, Aldis said.

“Or we can just fight about it for six months and do nothing,” Aldis said. “The political debate surrounding this issue should inspire us to act to make sure this never happens again.”

In 2016, the Department of Education changed its process for verifying e-school enrollment. Instead of simply reviewing forms where teachers certified that students were “offered” 920 hours of learning, state officials began requiring the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow and others to start proving through log-in data or other information that students were actually participating in school instruction.

That ultimately led to ECOT’s closure in January, after the state ordered it to repay $80 million for two years of unverified enrollment. The state found a number of students who were not coming close to the 920 hours of instruction.

Concern remains that e-schools are unclear about the data they must provide, and that the policy could shift again under influence of a new administration after November.

The group says lawmakers could start by implementing part of Senate Bill 39, changing portions of state law to define learning opportunities must be “provided,” and not merely “offered.” The difference is among the key arguments in ECOT’s ongoing lawsuit trying to block the state from using its new method of counting online students. A decision from the Ohio Supreme Court is expected soon.

“This would provide some clarity about how we’re doing things going forward, and would put a stake in the ground on the part of the legislature,” Goodnight said.

House and Senate leaders have discussed the e-school enrollment issue with each other as recently as this past weekend, as members of each chamber have looked over Yost’s recent ECOT audit to find gaps in state law that needed attention.

Yost also has raised issues with the Department of Education, where some have questioned if the area coordinators who are being asked to investigate and verify online school enrollment are trained to adequately analyze the mountains of data e-schools are giving them. Yost also said they are not uniformly applying standards.

In his ECOT audit released last month, Yost referred school officials for possible criminal fraud charges, accusing them of handing over student engagement data to the state that they knew to be false. But he also criticized the department for accepting the data, noting that “with the level of incompetence displayed by both the school and (the department), its regulator, it’s amazing that any money went to education whatsoever.”

In a letter last week to the department and legislative education committee leaders, Yost said the lack of training is “resulting in confusion in the schools and among coordinators regarding the shift between enrollment-based funding and duration-based funding. Schools appear to be trying to comply, but with inconsistencies in what learning management systems will capture and the lack of guidance from (the department), the schools are providing documentation that is impossible to audit.”

The Department of Education declined to comment.

Yost reiterated his past recommendations that the state move to either learning-based funding, determined by a student’s competency of a subject, or a hybrid model used by some states that combine enrollment and passage of exams to determine funding.

Lawmakers, he said, also should better define terms like “online learning,” “idle time,” and “classroom” for online schools, another provision that appears to be part of the new e-school legislation, House Bill 707.

Yost, Aldis and Goodnight also say lawmakers still need to address the 105-hour rule, by which a charter school must withdraw a student who misses more than 105 unexcused consecutive hours of school. That rule could allow a student to remain enrolled in an e-school while only logging in 10 times in a school year.

In addition to determining how to count students and fund e-schools, Aldis said, “We also have to ensure students aren’t just signing in once every couple weeks.”

Fordham recommends reducing the time for withdrawal to 65 hours, while Yost also is calling for a lower threshold.

Senate President Larry Obhof, R-Medina, said the 105-hour issue is one that could find some fairly quick resolution, such as aligning it more with traditional public schools, or ensuring that a student can’t just log in for a few minutes after 104 hours of unexcused absence and have the clock reset.

“Stuff like that, we can assess pretty quickly, where some of the other issues may be part of a longer process,” Obhof said.

jsiegel@dispatch.com

@phrontpage

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